Alienation from what it saw as a crisis of modernisation caused by the “accelerated speed of the industrial and technological revolution”65 and a perceived deterioration in the tone of academic life led academia to an even more rigidly nostalgic attachment to the values of the past and calls for a restoration of the true humanistic university concept coupled with a retreat from practically oriented research. More dangerously, their progressively stronger rejection of Western politics and liberal Western thought allowed the professors to identify
62
Fritz Haber, quoted in Forman, ‘Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists’, p 163
63 Forman, ‘Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists’, pp 165 – 167 64 Gispen, Poems in Steel, pp 110 - 111
themselves increasingly with the growing völkisch (nationalistic-ethnic) movement66 and the idea of a strong state with a cohesive national community which would re-establish the lost certainties of a bourgeois way of life.67 Coupled with a strong degree of latent anti- Semitism, their hypothetically neutral stance towards politics, contemporary affairs and even technology, by which they affirmed themselves as elevated from the rest of society, allowed right wing interests to abuse the study of history and literature for anti-Semitic and virulently nationalistic propaganda, thereby assisting the rise of the National Socialists.68 Majority support for the Nazis had also been achieved in a violently anti-Semitic student body long before 1933.69 By the time the academic elite realised that the “national” movement claiming to represent a “spiritual revival” which they had regarded as “genuine at the core” if a little “undisciplined” was in fact wholly pernicious, it was far too late to revise their position. Through what has been described as their “abandonment of
intellectual responsibility”,70 the consequences for academia as well as for the nation were disastrous.
If the increase in the student population pre-WWI had created fears of an academic proletariat in Germany, at the beginning of the 1930s student population ratios of around 25 per 10,000 of national population appeared to be causing generalised panic at the prospect of the creation of an entire generation of unemployed academics, as expressed in the writing of Pascal Jordan:
Only a fraction of those studying today will have the opportunity to find a
position such as that which they have in mind in the civil service…the reason for this overexpansion is without doubt mainly due to the defective structure of our education system (more exactly: to the failure of the politically motivated reforms which have been carried out since 1918)71
University graduates were again forced to take up positions inconsistent with their qualification level working, for example, in business where their qualifications were largely irrelevant.72 In industry, graduate engineers were increasingly falling foul of the
66 Paletschek, ‘The German University Idea’, p 43 67 Weisbrod, ‘Bourgeois Society in Germany’, p 33 68
Ben David, The Scientist’s Role in Society, pp 136 – 137
69 Weisbrod, ‘Bourgeois Society in Germany’, p 33
70 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, pp 443 - 446
71 Pascual Jordan, ‘Die Wandlung der Universität’, Rostocker Universitätszeitung vom 9. Mai 1933 pp 3 – 5,
Appendix 1 in Dieter Hoffman,‘Pascual Jordan im Dritten Reich – Schlaglichter’, Preprint 248, Max-Planck- Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2003, p 13, http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P248.PDF
(accessed 12.2.2006)
social conflict between the tradition of engineers as on-the-job trained craftsmen and the concept of a formally educated applied scientist. As a result, many complained of their “misuse or non-use”.73 Under the National Socialists, therefore, enrolment quotas for higher education were introduced, in particular for women.74 The following table shows the decline in student numbers from 1929 to 1937:
Table 2.3
Student Numbers in Universities and Technische Hochschulen (selected years 1929 – 1936)
Year Universities Technische Hochschulen
Male Female
%
Female Total Male Female
% Female Total 1929¹ 78 167 14 923 16.0 93 090 22 024 657 2.9 22 681 1934/35² 57 158 10 990 16.1 68 148 12 628 471 3.6 13 099 1936/37² 40 726 7 382 15.3 48 108 10 603 325 3.0 10 928 ¹ Summer Semester ² Winter Semester
Sources: Statistische Jahrbücher für das deutsche Reich (1930 - 1937)75
The reduction in numbers is striking. In a comparison with the 1929 figures, the number of men studying at university almost halved and the number of women was reduced by more than half, although their respective proportions remained little altered; the
Technische Hochschulen were even worse affected. The situation was aggravated by the
introduction of a compulsory six-month spell in labour camp and a further two years in military service for all those males succeeding in university entrance examinations. Once there, they were subjected to many pressures to remain in military service instead of taking up their university places.76 Formal university entry requirements were relaxed to favour deserving young Nazis who had proved their credentials through enlistment in the Hitler Youth or the Labour Service; nevertheless, these ultimately accounted for less than one percent of admissions to university and 1.76 percent to Technische Hochschulen. Thus,
73 Locke, The End of the Practical Man, pp 79 - 80
74 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, pp 439 – 440 75
Statistisches Jahrbüch für das deutsche Reich, (Berlin, Verlag von Reimar Hobbing, 1930), pp 456 – 457 and (Berlin, Verlag für Sozialpolitik, Wirtschaft und Statistik GmbH., 1935 and 1937), pp 520 – 522 (1935) and pp 582 – 583 (1937)
any change in the social origins of the student body was infinitesimal and the recruitment patterns established throughout the 19th century persisted.77
The system of academic self-government, however, was destroyed. Freedom of learning and the principle of the objectivity of scholarship were officially repudiated and there was an upsurge in research and teaching based on racism and völkisch thinking. The new regime had no use for scholarship without practical application for the aims of National Socialism and thus some of the more theoretical academic subjects were withdrawn to be replaced with pseudo-sciences such as Aryan linguistics, eugenics and the bizarre
Welteislehre – a National Socialist invention starting from the somewhat dubious premise
that the cosmos was formed by the energy derived from the struggle of blazing giant suns with infinite ice-fields in the universe.78 Technological development was heavily
prioritised and the Kaiser- Wilhelm Institutes met with particular favour. Their research, centred on the practical application of science in industry, had been involved throughout the Weimar period in projects aimed at economic self-sufficiency in order to free Germany from dependency on world markets. This pursuit of autarchy was unquestionably of benefit to the National Socialist in the build-up to war, thus the percentage of the national research funding ‘pot’ allocated to the KWG increased exponentially till 1945 at the expense of the Hochschulen.79
Reich Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels stated that, “We...live…in a century whose melody is determined by the thousand-fold buzz of machines and roar of engines”.80 Hence, large quantities of money were poured into applied and military research and development, particularly in strategic areas such as high-altitude flight, jet engines, high-speed aerodynamics, ballistics and rocket research. Despite this, however, and the growth of Luftfahrtzentren (Aviation Academic Education Centres) at a number of technical universities, the research effort was continually constricted by a shortage of qualified personnel. For example, in order to proceed at the pace and in the direction specified by the Nazi regime there was an estimated need for around 3,600 aeronautical
77 Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution, pp 262 – 263
78 Margit Szöllösi-Janze, ‘National Socialism and the Sciences’, in Szöllösi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third
Reich, pp 2 - 6
79 Ute Deichmann and Benno Müller-Hill, ‘Biological Research at Universities and Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes
in Nazi Germany’ in Renneberg Walker (ed.), Science, Technology and National Socialism, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), p 169; see also Susanne Helm, Carole Sachse and Mark Walker, The Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kristie Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997)
engineers annually: the Hochschulen managed to produce only 16 in 1937, 56 in 1938 and 57 in 1939. Additionally, long-term research projects were abandoned in favour of
projects of immediate use to the war effort, with the work increasingly tightly supervised by military and state bureaucracy, while secrecy was dramatically intensified. Indeed, obsessive secrecy was a feature of most areas of scientific research under National Socialism and therein lay a significant problem. Internally, an embargo on scientific publications prevented teamwork and blocked continuous cooperation on larger projects, which was particularly harmful to ‘big science’ projects such as aeronautics and atomic science. 81 Even more seriously, the long-term prospects, even for those scientific areas prioritised by the regime, were compromised by a virtual across the board prohibition of access to the wider scientific community. Germany’s disconnection from international scientific development effectively prevented the transfer of knowledge and technology thus further restricting its own scientific and technical progress. 82
The regime refused to recognise the traditional apolitical stance of the professoriate and proof of political reliability became generally mandatory. Few resisted NS pressure. Some, such as physicist Pascual Jordan, frankly allowed themselves to become political instruments exhorting the scientific community to orient research towards rearmament and an increase in technological capability because of the progressively more technical nature of war:
the ruling events of the young Greater German Reich – the four-year plan, rearmament and war – have shown work in the natural sciences its fixed place in the life of the nation83
More damaging still, after 1933 more than 2,500 scholars and scientists, classed as either non-Aryan, with Jewish spouses or politically unreliable were expelled from universities, Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes and other research centres. This involved around fifteen percent of all university professors and Dozenten (associate professors)84 but accounted for
twenty-five percent of all physicists and twenty-six percent of all biochemists, reflecting
81 Helmuth Trischler, ‘Aeronautical Research under National Socialism’, in Szöllösi-Janze, Science in the
Third Reich, pp 84 - 96
82 Szöllösi-Janze, ‘National Socialism and the Sciences’, p 22
83 Pascual Jordon, ‘Olymiade der Wissenschaft’, Der Student in Mecklenburg-Lübeck vom 5.12.1936 pp 8 –
9, Appendix 3 in Hoffman, ‘Pascual Jordan im Dritten Reich – Schlaglichter’, p 20; Pascual Jordan,
‘Naturwissenschaft im Umbruch’, in Deutschlands Erneuerung, Vol. 25 (1941) pp 452 – 458, Appendix 4 in Hoffman, ‘Pascual Jordan im Dritten Reich – Schlaglichter’, p 22
84 Mitchell G Ash, ‘Scientific Changes in Germany 1933, 1945, 1990: Towards a Comparison’, Minerva 37,
the high proportion of Jews in these disciplines. More than two thirds were forced to emigrate and a small number were killed or died in concentration camps. The Jewish scientists had tended to work in more modern and progressive areas which challenged the traditional trajectory of scientific development, in large part because of a high degree of anti-Semitism in academia which prevented their progression in the fields of ‘pure science’. Their dismissal was accompanied by the marginalisation of many of their innovations, either in an attempt to secure the approval of the National Socialists or to avoid any possible association with Judaism.85 The overall loss to German scholarship and science caused by the forced emigrations was immense and was, moreover, a direct cause of the strikingly backward state, particularly of biotechnology in Germany through the 1970s. By the time the significance of biotechnology to future technological development was belatedly realised, the gaps in the infrastructure of research and development would be virtually insurmountable. Additionally, those scientists expelled numbered among the most gifted and most often cited scientists in the world (more than 2.4 times more often than those who remained) and included a large number of future Nobel Prize winners.86 The forced expulsion also enabled the transfer of specific research programmes, for instance in nuclear physics and molecular biology, to the countries receiving the émigrés, thus benefiting their research at the expense of Germany’s. The refinement of these projects would ultimately result in developments such as particle accelerators and the world’s first ultraviolet spectrophotometer.87